Vitalik Buterin, ethereum’s inventor, has stated that criticisms of Proof of Stake (PoS) that the rich get richer is one of the less good criticisms.

“Proof of Work is the rich get richer squared, so if we can get to the rich get richer to the power of one, that’s already a substantial improvement,” he said.

Speaking during a fireside chat in Zug, Buterin said Bitmain’s two mining pools collectively control 43% of the hashrate. “If you add in ViaBTC, which is basically kind of affiliated with Bitmain, all together you have 53%,” he said.

That’s more than 51%, with a fairly small mini-cartel having 53% according to Buterin. However, officially and as far as we’re aware, Bitmain only controls BTC.com, Antpool and ConnectBTC, which in combination did rise to 43%, but not beyond 51%. Nishant Sharma from Bitmain, says:

“They are separate pools by code (one of them being completely open-source), by team, by offices and by location of those offices (different countries).”

Buterin, however, says there would be an incentive to hide decentralization due to public relations issues.

“Back in 2013 when Ghash had 51%, that was a big, huge scare moment. Everyone really complained a lot and eventually Ghash backed down and voluntarily dropped themselves to 40%, but now it’s basically happening a second time and people just aren’t talking as much,” he says.